Quotes from Sy Montgomery

I wonder: Can a brainless animal feel curiosity? Does it want to play? Or does it only "want" toys or food the way a plant "wants" the sun? Does a sea star experience consciousness? If it does, what does consciousness feel like to a sea star? Clearly, I have entered a world I cannot judge by the rules I have learned on land among vertebrates

Feathers are among the most complex structural organs found in nature. Nothing of comparable dimension is stronger. They are made of keratin, the same as a human's fingernails, a horse's hooves, and a rhino's horn—but the keratin in feathers, due to a difference in molecular structure, is even tougher.

teachers are all around to help you: with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.

typical bird's feathers outweigh its skeleton. Feathers define a bird. By trapping and moving air, feathers protect the bird from cold and wet, and they enable it to fly.

I had rooted for Godzilla and King Kong instead of for the people trying to kill them. ... Nobody likes to be awakened from slumber by a nuclear explosion

Hummingbirds are less flesh than fairies. They are little more than bubbles fringed with iridescent feathers—air wrapped in light.

Signed by scientists including physicist Stephen Hawking in front of 60 Minutes cameras, it asserts that "humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness" and that "nonhuman animals, including all birds and mammals, and many other creatures, including octopuses [italics added], also possess these neurological substrates.

Perhaps, I muse, this is the pace at which the Creator thinks, in this weighty, graceful, liquid manner—like blood flows, not like synapses fire.

To dive beneath the surface feels like entering the Earth's vast, dreaming subconscious.

A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you look at the world's mammals by weight, 96 percent of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.

But look at all those neurons in the arms!" he said. "They may have a radically different style of psychological organization from us. Perhaps in octopus we see intelligence without a centralized self. If you have the design of an octopus," Peter asked, "is there a sense of self at all, a center of experience? If not, that involves imagining something so different from us it might be impossible to think of.

Sculpture is about process, and this process is often fragmented. In a way, our lives are like that. A lot of people have trouble with transitions, with discontinuity. But this is what makes us grow. It's mysterious. You shift to a new platform and see things from a different perspective. Art does that. Wildlife does that. Wildlife and art reveal these transitions and demand we experience them.

Thousands of billions of mothers—from the gelatinous ancestors of Octavia, to my own mother—have taught their kind to love, and to know that love is the highest and best use of a life. Love alone matters, and makes its object worthy. And love is a living thing, even if Octavia's eggs were not.

voles make up 85 percent of the diet. (One feature of vole biology that inadvertently helps out hawks is that these rodents mark their territories with urine, which Scandinavian researchers recently discovered reflects ultraviolet light. Hawks can see UV light—and may well use the voles' territorial markings as signposts to the nearest restaurant.)

Who is God? Moses asked the burning bush, and God himself replied. Older texts report Yahweh's answer as "I am who I am.

Beston writes that animals "are not brethren, they are not underlings" but beings "gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear." They are, he writes, "other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

In the side yard are their aviaries, called mews.

There is a word, sad and resonant, for the last member of a dying species. The word is endling.

Wholeness feels like gratitude. Gratitude that we are safe and happy and together. And for that, I must thank equally the foxes and the weasels, the tigers and the crocodiles. For the peace of the barnyard, I am grateful to the dangers and jaws of the jungle. For the belonging that is home, I can thank, in part, the exile that is travel. Though they seem like opposites, they are more like twins—two halves of a whole.

The Outermost House, American naturalist Henry Beston writes that animals "are not brethren, they are not underlings" but beings "gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear." They

gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

And long before the appearance of Archaeopteryx—whose scientific name means "first bird

I began to repeat in my head the first words of the Fisherman's Prayer, the words to which John F. Kennedy kept on his desk at the White House: "Oh God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.

The purpose of fear, clearly, is to help you get away - which it does. If your heart rate increases, there is more blood pumping so you can use that blood to fuel your muscles to run away. Oxygen is sent to the lungs so you can run fast. Pupils dilating help you see in the dark. All of that prepares your body to fight or escape.